Address by the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Prime Minister and Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Edi Rama – 27th OSCE Ministerial Council:

 

Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen!

Welcome from Tirana to the 27th Ministerial Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe!

It’s a pleasure to see on this large screen so many of you and it would have been even a bigger pleasure to have seen you here in the capital of Albania. But in this challenging time this is the only way we have been left with.

I hereby declare formally the 27th meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council open and let me now proceed to agenda item 2, adoption of the agenda.

Let me recall that the draft agenda of this meeting was forwarded to us by the Permanent Council  as document MCGAL/120/Rev1. May assume that we can now adopt this agenda?

Ok.

Is there anyone who wants to take the floor? Ok.

The agenda is hereby adopted.

Agenda item 3: Address by the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office. So let me now take up agenda item 3 and allow me in my capacity as the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office to deliver my address.

Dear friends!

Ladies and gentlemen!

When Albania took over the Chairmanship of the OSCE in January, everyone spoke of an Organization that is struggling. By sitting here now, I can only confirm what my predecessors also felt. We are in crisis, a worsening crisis. This is not a state of affairs that has been brought on by our Organization, its structures or its people. They should all be commended for their tireless commitment to improving comprehensive security in Europe.

Instead, let’s face it. This sorry state of affairs has been brought on by us, the 57 participating states of the OSCE.

We supposedly have a shared vision created in Helsinki and continued in Paris, Istanbul and Astana for a democratic peaceful and united Europe.

That vision is moving further away from us because our principles are not respected, because our commitments are not implemented, because our divergence in our views is growing, because unilateral is too often chosen over international, because confrontation is chosen over conversation and because disruption is chosen over cooperation. This should at least deeply trouble us all. We must bear in mind the world also beyond the OSCE region, a world in which we represent a declining share of the global population, a declining share of global GDP. A world in which we are concerned about preserving and promoting our interests, will not maintain our influence if we are not united or steadfast in our commitment to what we stand for.

But setting aside the geopolitics, I’m far more troubled by what our current crisis of corporation means at the local level.

It means we fail to properly address our weaknesses and to better ourselves or take all the threats and challenges our societies face, from terrorism to climate change, or stand up for the rights and freedoms of all our people, including the young the elderly, the vulnerable and the underrepresented.

Yet the appeals of previous OSCE Chairs, calling for strength and cooperation to address this, have largely fallen on deaf ears.

I have to say this. Your heart is either in this Organization or it is not;

You either want to prevent and settle conflicts or you don’t;

You either want to promote free media or you don’t;

You either want to protect human rights and democracy or you don’t.

It is really that simple.

Our Organization is only as strong as its commitments and our regional security is only as strong as your will to implement those commitments. If that will is lacking as it seems to be today then we will struggle to ever emerge from a crisis that brings us crisis and crisis all and over again. Look at what happened to Belarus and how suddenly OSCE remained there as a kind of last resort, while the other mega-structures looked useless.

Why so?

Because, sadly enough, whatever happens out of the EU raises immediately the barricades between the EU and NATO countries and Russia, but not only. And it immediately becomes a matter of much larger scale, while the very matter of people, ordinary people, concerns, aspirations, rights, freedoms in the place of crisis is de fact put in jeopardy. It cannot go on like that endlessly. This should change the sooner the better.

Our Organization cannot work if the Cold War attitude is not left behind for good.

Much easier said than done, of course, but at least it should be said and it should be discussed. And in no other space than this space, the OSCE space this can be discussed and, hopefully, can happen. And no other organization than this one can race to the challenge of uniting while these two conflicting worlds within the space of Helsinki school of thought raise and disrupt over and over again.

Dear colleagues, even by usual standards, this has been a particularly testing year for the OSCE.

The extraordinary and unprecedented consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have affected all areas of our lives. My sympathy goes to those who have lost loved ones as a result of the virus and my sincere thanks go to those health and frontline workers, who persevere every day every night in keeping us safe and maintaining our essential services.

While we predominantly focus on the health and economic consequences of COVID we must also take its adverse impact on our comprehensive security.

It has led to disruption in our military verification activities, intensified the humanitarian impact of conflicts, resulted in a significant increase in cyber crime and proven fertile ground for disinformation, to name but a few examples.

It has also had a substantial human impact with emergency measures restricting rights, increases in domestic violence and online exploitation and worrying instances of xenophobia discrimination and intolerance.

We all know this will feel like a long winter, but there is a brighter future ahead and we can and we will take bold and concerted measures to build back better and to not waste the future.

At the outset of the year, I stated that the conflict with respect to Ukraine was the utmost priority of our Chairmanship. That has not changed and it cannot change. Some progress is being made but there is still a long way to go for a comprehensive and peaceful resolution of the conflict, including with respect to the challenges related to Crimea. It remains an unacceptable situation, bearing in mind our principles and commitments and let’s not forget the Minsk Agreement.

Seven years on, lives continue to be lost. Every single casualty is devastation for a household, for a family, for a community. In my first visit as Chairperson-in-Office to Ukraine, I witnessed personally how the conflict has taken its toll on the population, but I also witnessed the positive change that the OSCE can bring. And we have seen what further progress is possible when there is a political will, as shown by the mutual release and exchange of detainees in April and, most recently, with the measures to strengthen the ceasefire that took effect on 27th of July. This has resulted in unprecedented low level of ceasefire violations on the ground, although casualties continue due to mines and explosive devices even under this “new normal”.

So, the humanitarian situation remains worrying and it is unfortunate that by now it has not been possible for the sides to build on this tangible commitment to ceasefire to make progress in other aspects of the Minsk Agreement. And let me repeat, shying away from the Minsk Agreement is not finding a way towards the future.

Last December, the Normandy 4 leaders met after three years and agreed on conclusions that can indeed boost the process, but should be fully implemented. These opportunities are not abundant, and I appeal for a more practical approach in the discussions in the Trilateral Contact Group under the mediation of the OSCE.

We need to make best use of it.

We also need to make best use of the Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, whose budget we agreed to increase this year. It has been a difficult year for the SMM and I expressed my outmost appreciation to the dedicated women and men of the Mission. SMM has continued to implement its mandate while taking into account its duty of care considerations. But there is no justification for any interference with the work of the Mission throughout Ukraine and nor is there justification for situations where the safety and the security of the civilian SMM staff or the Mission’s assets are threatened.

SMM must be allowed to do its job.

Elsewhere in our region while the world was fighting the pandemic, the OSCE mediators were also fighting distrust and the potential hardening of conflict divides. We cannot let this Ministerial Council pass without referencing he recent fighting in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict context, where many lives were lost.

I am thankful fighting was over and has ceased. Now it is time to implement the commitments undertaken and I express my full support for initiatives under the auspices of the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group to relaunch the negotiation process.

Substantive negotiations must now be continued in good faith in order to reach agreement on the steps for a comprehensive peaceful and lasting resolution of the conflict.

Our Chairmanship has also sought to prioritize the situation of conflict-affected populations in Georgia.

There were glimpses of cooperation and pragmatism on public health issues, which the OSCE has nurtured through its good offices.

In fact, the OSCE was able to increase its regular contact with all stakeholders.

At the same time however, we observed the action of additional obstacles as part of so-called “borderization efforts” and we saw limitations on the freedom of movement of local residents across the administrative boundary lines.

These restrictions magnified socioeconomic hardships and in some cases placed an additional burden on those seeking medical care.

The dialogue efforts of the Geneva International Discussions had to be postponed although we welcome the commitment of all participants to reconvene those talks next week after a pause of nearly a year.

I would like to underline also the need to continue the result-oriented Transdnistrian Settlement Process.

The pandemic has posed challenges to the interconnectivity between both banks of the river and the process has slowed down.

I call for the rapid restoration of the freedom of movement and encourage the sides to re-engage in a negotiation process next year when Sweden will be chairing the OSCE and build on the progress made.

Dear colleagues!

This year we have also seen new developments in our region which cause serious concern in particular – and I go back to this point the ongoing situation in Belarus. Things haven’t improved, unfortunately, in the past four months, particularly with respect to the ongoing violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The losses of lives and injuries have been especially troubling.  

In august, together with my Swedish counterpart, Minister Ann Linde, who kindly arrived in Tirana and is here with me, we offered to visit Belarus and facilitate dialogue. It was an offer to help to Belarus as one of us, recognizing that the situation must be resolved in Minsk among the people of Belarus in full respect for their independence sovereignty and international obligations.

But this offer was rejected. It could have been an opportunity to move from confrontation to meaningful dialogue. Instead confrontation has continued.

I maintain my view that the OSCE as an inclusive organization remains well-placed and ready to volunteer its good offices to support Belarus and I hope Belarus reconsiders this offer that will stand there although under the new Chairmanship.

But again i want to stress what can be a very important lesson learned from this crisis, which is the very fact that suddenly,  I repeat, the OSCE remained the last address, the last station, the last resort.

This shows something. This shows that in this large space of the OSCE world we need to focus on how we boost the OSCE tools and how we make of the OSCE a possible instrument to help members to solve crisis, by realizing finally that other mega-structures are not able to do so.

Ladies and gentlemen!

Albania has therefore had to steer the OSCE ship in particularly turbulent times. And things became even harder to steer with the vacancies in our Organization’s four senior management positions in July.

The effectiveness of the OSCE needs capable senior management and it was another moment where we saw how important this senior management is, but also how important is to focus on strengthening, first and foremost, the trust within this Organization and on bringing this organization to another level, by making it a genuine Organization about the principles on which it was founded, but by not allowing it to become another space where the permanent conflict between, as I said earlier, the EU and NATO family and Russia and not only is just transferred.

The OSCE’s effectiveness needs capable senior management and I am delighted that at this Council we are set to appoint the OSCE’s new leadership:

Helga Schmid as Secretary General of the Organization

Matteo Mecacci as for the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights

Teresa Ribeiro as Representative of Freedom of the Media

Kairat Abdrakhmanov as the High Commissioner on National Minorities

I have every confidence in their abilities and I call on you all to fully support them in implementing their vital mandates over the next three years.

I’m also delighted we now have a succession of future chairs in Sweden and Poland.

Together with the new leadership and the incoming chairmanships, I believe we can get back to full power and chart a way forward for our Organization.

In a shifting world, we all recognize the need for new strategic direction and openness to reform and sufficient investment and these should be three main goals for the OSCE itself.

So, colleagues let’s use Tirana as an opportunity to turn the corner, to emerge from our current crisis of cooperation and to build towards 2025, the 50th year of the OSCE to make it an Organization that delivers on its commitments for each and every one of our people.

Thank you very much!